Diablo IV pitch meeting

PC General Discussion
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The idea is to present a pain point about Diablo IV and then, offer an idea to improve the situation.

There are not enough avenues to build character power.

Playing as a Sorcerer it feels like the only way to increase power in a way that feels competitive with the rest of the classes, is to stack critical damage and critical chance.

Damage over time, Overpower, vulnerable, thorns, lucky hit, etc., all feel weak past Pit tier 80. (Not taking into account unintended interactions, exploits, bugs and similar situations).

Ideally, I think it would be better if all skills at least had two DIFFERENT paths to reach power equilibrium with other classes.

It doesn’t feel good when the majority of the sorcerer abilities reach a similar Pit tier, if everyone else, playing a different class, is clearing 20 or 30 pit tiers higher with ease, or when you are participating in a group activity, and people are zipping around the map, killing everything instantly.

This is what I mean when I say, that critical damage and chance, seems like the ONLY viable route to be competitive option for us sorceress.

The Diablo IV development team needs to take a look at what players consider as “viable” in my example, sorcerer being build around criticals, and ask, how far behind is everything else.

Once we know that information, developers need to create multiple ways for the player to accomplish that goal, don’t make and item, that fixes everything with one find, spread the power across multiple systems. With the exception of seasonal powers, do not use seasonal powers as part of the equation, because it feels bad that a build works temporarily. We need permanent solutions.

IMO, “build defining unique”, sound good in theory, but they make your class feel “crappy” until you find the one item (I think this is the biggest pitfall about the Druid).

Additional ideas around this topic.

When a Sorcerer player, finds the mythic unique Andariel’s Visage, that good feeling you get when you see the purple ray beam, is immediately erased, when you realize, there is no way for you to leverage your character around that poison nova, making the item useless at the pit higher tiers. Instead, it should embark you on a journey, to change course, with the promise of a brighter future. (Higher tier clears).

I think, Blizzard needs to add Paragon boards that are shared across all classes and don’t speak to any particular class, but contribute towards a greater principle. I imagine a Paragon Board that greatly improves “damage over time” related stuff and has a legendary node that helps this damage type scale exponentially, like critical damage does. Maybe this kind of board requires the player to sacrifice something of great importance to activate. (at the very least you are sacrificing a class specific board).

I think a major missed opportunity, is that paragon boards are granted by just playing the game, and there is no accomplishment needed to unlock them. The game just gives them to you via time spent.

I think Diablo IV being an systems ACTION role playing game, should have more “skill checks”. The action part is really taking a back seat lately.

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D4 leadership will never listen to ideas about improving the game. This is not their focus and they have made it obvious. The game has a different purpose for them.

Now give them cheap, low risk ideas/parlor tricks to increase revenue and you will have their undivided attention until some bean counter tells them whether or not it fits the statistics.

Unfortunately, this is what the game is and always was.

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I had a quick read of the first few paragraphs so far.

These are the sort of things that would come to the surface and could be developed better if they had a class/build balance lead that can get their head around all the builds and capabilities.

Repeatable power v env Testing, modelling to better inform decisions and guiding devs working in the detail are benefits that can come out of a role more dedicated to what is essentially one of the fundamental components of the game.

It all starts with visibility of how the whole system is working.

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Collecting long rune words that gave us multiple powers would be a good addition to end game.

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Oh one of these thread again….cool

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“sorcs are having fun, let’s nerf ball lightning by -87%.”
“Fractured Winterglass looks fun too, let’s nerf it.”
“nerf it further.”
“more nerfs.”
“what? can’t nerf FW anymore? then we nerf Conjuration Mastery.”
“further nerf CM by -50%.”
“let’s change CM to Primordial Bindings and nerf it further by -67%.”
“what? lightning spear looks good? nerf it to 12.”
“hey sorcs, we’re reviving ball lightning! check out okun & stormhorn!”
“nerf ball lightning to 10.”
“okun & stormhorn become total junk.”
“what do we do now?”
“maybe we revive ice shards in season 8?”

checking the history, is more likely to ask the devs to nerf rather than buffing gameplay.

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So true. I do watch most of the campfire chats, and (generally) they introduce some new equipment that looks like it could be fun. They hype it up and explain why they are adding it. Usually they’ll say some skill is underused or “feels bad.” Then one season later, they nerf it into oblivion. It’s like they don’t or can’t remember what they said three months ago.
Maybe they’re just adding items to bolster sales of specific armor sets in the Macro Transaction shop. Who knows? I don’t think they do!

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you got the point here. suspicious of a business fraud and feature scam, giving false hope to lure season pass purchases, then nerfing the features afterward.

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Checking the history we went from 1M being big number to trillions being common. U sure they just nerf things?

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My take on nerfs.

I don’t like the damage numbers reaching millions. Because understanding how powerful something is relative to something else becomes increasingly impossible. You understand something is more powerful, but by how much it’s the difficult part.

This season was a catastrophe because my damage is in the several dozen billions to hundreds of billions, depending if it’s a single target or a group.

I use the numbers as a compass to know if my build is getting better, but the magnitude of the numbers doesn’t really matter to me.

What matters is the time to kill.

Where I draw the line and dislike nerfs, it’s when the fun of a build takes a hit.

Capping the amount of lightning spears, balls of lightning, firewalls, etc, feels pretty bad for me.

Also, nerfs feel even worse, when my class is getting nerfed pretty severely and other classes remain overpowered.

There are aspects about sorcerer that I find to be overpowered. Like crowd control. It blew my mind that in the expansion the one ability we got, is super good at it, I was expecting nerfs to crowd control and we got more of it.

In Diablo III the buffs and nerfs always flew over my head because I play solo.

But in Diablo IV, because of the open world and the group activities, you get a lot of perspective, that opens your eyes.

Barbarians and the spiritborn, came out in such a broken and overpowered state, that I would never play them, they are the easy mode of Diablo IV, forever tainted in my brain.

I’m calling for buffs, because I want to be able to build a firewall sorcerer that, doesn’t suck, is competitive damage wise with lightning spear, but offers a different gameplay feel.

I can imagine a pure damage over time sorc that combines firewall and hydras, or a lucky hit firewall sorc, that uses crit, meteor enchantment, X’fall… I don’t like incinerate, don’t ask.

You can do this builds today, but damage wise, they stuck.

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I agree with your take.

Things like

should be great for the game. One class being good at one thing, another one in different thing. Providing synergy among the classes and also a different feel when playing different class.

Sadly, it doesn’t really matter because there’s barely any friction in the game so there are no moments where you wish you’d bring a sorc to help with CC or class x to do y.

Tbh there aren’t even basic synergies among the classes like D2s paladin’s aura + necro minions. Even D3 does better on that front (even better than D2 imho). Yet this is open world “always multiplayer” game and has next to nothing of the sorts.

Then ofc everything just boils down to time to kill because you tackle every obstacle (if you can call it that) in the same way - dealing more damage.

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Yeah…

Well the thing is, in Diablo III, you can heard hundreds of monsters into one cluster, and then crowd control them and kill them, but in Diablo IV the crowd control is baked in into every skill, so the monsters get stuck.

I agree with your take on multilayer.

If they want me to want to group up and leave my solo days behind, the whole game would need to make me so uncomfortable takling it solo that I feel like I must find a group.

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I think simplest explanation is the most likely to be the cause. There’s a lack of visibility of the implications of making changes. Relying on PTR isn’t sufficient.

There’s more they can do to get visibility of the affect changes will have internally and before changes hit PTR.

It starts with a dedicated role to understand how all the builds and capabilities are interacting. The efficient way to achieve this is to dedicate a suitable person primarily to that function.

Then they can also build repeatable tests to verify the impacts when changes are made.

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Our view of a pitch meeting is what the team pitches back and forth as ideas.

In reality the pitch meeting is how much pitch (hot tar) to drop on players from the towers to slow them down to 10% in T4.

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interesting, as long as the billions and trillions number has its audience, i won’t disagree with your opinion.

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And don’t forget, they broke Greater Chain Lightning 30% Damage with this season’s patch, and as far as I can tell, they still didn’t bother to fix it in PTR season 8!

What’s up with that?

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IT took dedicated team of necro players and several posts in forums and streams and then the devs 57 tries to fix one ring. That is why.

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Artificially capping things is the fallback when you dont know what to do. You dont know how to make paragon boards interesting and worthwhile to get key nodes and so everyone was just pathing to glyphs and ignoring most the boards. So they just limit it to 5.

Capping spears and damage from certain paragons and so on means again you dont know how to fix the actual problem and are using the bandaid of capping.

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Things did not even get acknowledged until a Streamer put Blizzard on blast and exposed the latent problems with Minions and Mendeln. Had that not happened, it would still not work properly like Third Blade for Barbarians.

Sounds to me players need to Unionize and the mouth breathing neckbeard streamers can be the Union reps.

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Counterpoint: no it wouldn’t